Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

directorsblog.nih.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 349 posts

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#201

Post by konschubert »

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression is a component of general intelligence. A few years ago I was very sceptical of machine learning ever leading to general intelligence. I've since changed my mind. There are a lot of parallels to this work and the concept of "embeddings" in machine learning. Intelligence requires the ability to generalize. A prerequisite for generalization is the ability to take something high-dimensional and reduce it to…

I find it funny how I can "see" a map of the world in front of me when I imagine it, but I totally cannot draw it.

Clearly, much less information is stored than the whole image... yet my mind DALL-E style fills in the gaps and "sees" a map.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#202

Post by leaflets2 »

pc86 wrote: post #190
dudeman13 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion You are awfully optimistic about the rationality of humans, aren't you? :)

I know this is a joke but it seems unnecessary. Most people actually do use evidence and logic to arrive at their opinions. The problem is some people are presented with incorrect or fabricated evidence. Some people draw incorrect conclusions, or maybe some of the evidence is above their head so they ignore that when it's vital to proper understanding. Some people aren't particularly good at logical thinking, or neve…

> Most people actually do use evidence and logic

That's not how humans function.

They are social animals and copy the opinions and beliefs of those they want to be (stay) friends with.

Being part of the group is what matters, evolutionary, not logics and being right.

And to influence others, step 1 is to make them look at you as a friend. There's a book about that :-)

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#203

Post by dpierce9 »

whatshisface wrote: post #173
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that definitions aren't real because they're not physical objects?

I'm implying that natural-language definitions are physical objects, in your brain, made up of brain stuff, and that you can't write them down in ways that are much briefer than a full description of their physical manifestation, although you can roughly approximate them in something like a dictionary.

Then why bother writing these sentences? I have no idea what you mean by them.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#204

Post by sgtnoodle »

TameAntelope wrote: post #96

I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right. At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store the…

I had that thought this morning, knowing I have to present at a design review today!

I think the boring solution is to take written notes when making decisions. As an engineer, I find that architecture documents are very powerful and always worth while.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#205

Post by gryn »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #180
whatshisface wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that I cannot decide the breadness of arbitrary inputs in bounded time, although I contend that does not stop me from claiming to have defined bread, on the grounds that the set of Turing machines that halt is well-defined but also has the same difficulty you're describing.

A definition doesn't change: The prime numbers or Turing Machines are the same set regardless of who Putin invades next or what law Biden decides to veto. But the set of inputs that an oracle implicitly defines, could change if the oracle changes. And you could change your mind or die tomorrow. So you would need a very large number of definitions of bread, indexed by (time, person). Any one of them could be a valid d…

> A definition doesn't change

but they do, the definition of many words changed over time some to even start to mean the opposite of what they initially did.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#206

Post by Enginerrrd »

TameAntelope wrote: post #96

I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right. At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store the…

This is a very astute point. But I would also add that, IMO, you only ever even perceived reality as a compressed summary.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#207

Post by JackFr »

theptip wrote: post #89
roflc0ptic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

possible it's just bad science reporting

Reading the paper's abstract, definitely just bad science reporting. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/

I don't know. I just don't see it.

The subject is given two tasks requiring working memory. The researchers observe activity in the parietal and visual cortices via fMRI, and find the neural activity between the two tasks is indistinguishable. And conclude

> ... distinct visual stimuli (oriented gratings and moving dots) are flexibly recoded into the same WM format in visual and parietal cortices when that representation is useful for memory-guided behavior.

Seems a pretty big leap to me.

I'm not a neuroscientist, and fMRI is amazing. But I think there's more handwaving about how 'thoughts' and 'memories' are 'encoded' as if the brain were a piece of electronics we fully understood.

There's no magic -- everything we think has to happen at some physical level, but I think there is a generation of neuroscientists who are fooling themselves by projecting a reductionist mental(?!) model of how the brain works that is as yet unjustified, and interpreting all of their results in the light of that model.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#210

Post by axg11 »

konschubert wrote: post #201
axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression is a component of general intelligence. A few years ago I was very sceptical of machine learning ever leading to general intelligence. I've since changed my mind. There are a lot of parallels to this work and the concept of "embeddings" in machine learning. Intelligence requires the ability to generalize. A prerequisite for generalization is the ability to take something high-dimensional and reduce it to…

I find it funny how I can "see" a map of the world in front of me when I imagine it, but I totally cannot draw it. Clearly, much less information is stored than the whole image... yet my mind DALL-E style fills in the gaps and "sees" a map.

Already plugged this book elsewhere in the thread, you might be interested in "The Mind is Flat". One chapter of the book explores the concept you're describing. Our brain creates the illusion of a "full picture" when often our imagination and internal representation is quite sparse. I think that's one of the key impressive qualities of our brains and general intelligence. We only do the minimum necessary imagination and computation. As we explore a particular concept or scene, our brains augment the scene with more details. In other words, our mind is making it up as we go along.
Post reply on HN